The Centre for Film Studies is pleased to welcome to St Andrews Professor Ian
Buchanan, Cardiff University.
Prof. Buchanan is the founding editor of Deleuze Studies
(<http://www.eupjournals.com/journal/dls>) published by Edinburgh
University. Prof. Buchanan is also the series editor of "Deleuze Connections".
He has published widely on the work of Deleuze, de Certeau and
Jameson.
Talk: Jindabyne and the political unconscious of ‘white’ Australia.
Tues 17th November 2009, 17:15 – 19:15
School V, St Salvator’s Quad, North St, University of St Andrews.
Abstract:
On February 13, 2008, the Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd issued a
national apology to the indigenous people of Australia for the hurt caused by
two hundred years of state-sponsored action against them. More specifically,
the apology was for the government’s six decades long attempt to enact
cultural genocide by removing young aboriginal children from their families and
placing them with white families as part of a deliberate program of forced
cultural assimilation. It is estimated that between 1910 and 1970 somewhere
between 10% and 30% of indigenous children were forcibly taken from the
families and placed into foster care. A National Inquiry into the treatment of
Australia’s indigenous people was conducted by the Human Rights and Equal
Opportunity Commission in 1995. Its report, entitled /Bringing Them Home/,
recommended a national apology as one of the key steps in moving forward,
but it took more than a decade – effectively the length of time the previous
Prime Minister John Howard was in power – for it to be acted on. Howard’s
rationale (as his successor the Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson reiterated in
his Sorry Day speech) was that the present generation could not be expected
to apologise for acts they themselves were not responsible for and did not
themselves commit. Always a canny reader of public opinion, Howard obviously
felt there was no political capital to be made from the apology and plenty to
lose. The rash of redneck blogs that sprang up in the wake of the apology
suggest, sadly enough, that Howard wasn’t wrong in his impression of the
cultural temperament of Australia. Rudd meanwhile clearly used the apology to
distance his administration from Howard’s and stamp his government as new
and progressive. It is this thirteen year gap between identifying that a
grievous wrong had been committed and actually apologising for it that Ray
Lawrence’s 2006 third feature /Jindabyne/ anticipates and dramatises. I will
read /Jindabyne/ as an example of what Fredric Jameson would term a national
allegory of contemporary Australia and try to show how it illuminates the
political unconscious of ‘white’ Australia.
Bio:
I am the founding editor of *Deleuze Studies*
<http://www.eupjournals.com/journal/dls>, a new journal sponsored by the
*Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory*
<http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/encap/research/ccct/index.html> and published by
Edinburgh University. I am also the series editor of "Deleuze Connections". I
have published widely on the work of Deleuze, de Certeau and Jameson.
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